The Promise

Sayblood's Children: Part Twelve (Finale)

Sayblood’s Children is a folk horror/romance novella, serialized in twelve parts. This is Part Twelve, the Finale.

(Stay tuned next week for the Epilogue!)

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Previously, Sayblood had to finally confront her past in order to save her future.

In this chapter, confessions, decisions, and conclusions.

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Photo by Johnny Kaufman on Unsplash

I think often of my mother.

Though I never knew her, I see her in you. In both of you.

If there is any truth to her spilled blood being the strength of my hands, then that strength is even more potent in you. Your wit, your vision, your ferocity. Wing and tooth, fur and feather. You walk in both worlds. The poet’s promise, and the underworld’s shadows. You see what others cannot. You repair the wound in this world, simply by living. Pulling souls from the darkness, like the man who sired you.

I could not be more proud.

My daughters. The strength of my hands. No blades could be sharper. No steel could be stronger. I need nothing more than to see you happy.

I write these words because I know that history may never remember this story properly. The years pass and this island grows, more and more souls arriving every day across the sea. The trees still speak, but in whispers. The passage underground is lost to us, now. Sumble’s mouths seem to close tight, only myth and folktale mumbled among the very old. Time has a way of obscuring, exaggerating, changing, evolving. No tale is untouched.

If it is true that someday, long years from now, we will be forgotten, I pray that what remains of us may be this, and this alone:

The poet raised the Blood Woman to the light.

The orchardist raised her children as his own.

The woman traded thorns for apples.

And the daughters turned it all to green and gold.

*******

After the dreams, Sayblood woke to darkness, but it was velvet-footed and easy. The kind she had learned to love during her time spent Above, blaze-edged with the glow of the woodstove and warm under soft blankets. It was not cold, like stone. It was moon-drenched and airy with an early spring wind nosing under the door and being turned away, listless, to return to the sea.

Beside her in the bed lay her daughters, tiny and perfect, stirring in time with the change in her breath’s waking rhythm, their little mouths working, pouting in their dreams of milk and womb.

Sayblood thought of Wren sleek with feathers and Rose lithe with fur and wondered if, perhaps, she had imagined it all. If she did not know that she was lying in Othniel’s cabin, she could almost have convinced herself that everything since leaving the fisherfolk was a blood-soaked nightmare.

But no. She could feel the ache in her shoulder from Vaziel’s bite, and the weight of it all—Bill, and One Prince, and the starvelings and the island’s wrath—sat heavy on her throat like a sob even still, holding her in place.

The cabin door opened presently and Othniel limped in, setting the rifle down just inside the door before closing it against the night. Sayblood could see the outline of a bandage under his trouser leg.

He staggered to the stove and set another log within its jaws, then settled the kettle on top of it. Sayblood watched him, silent. She watched his slow and steady movements, now so familiar to her. She watched his broad shoulders—slumped with fatigue and grief—and the curved place at the base of his neck when he removed his hat, and the calm of him filled her with peace in a way that no one else had ever done.

Shrike had been her poet. He had been her dreamer. He had filled her mind and her eyes with the Sun and Stars, with visions of what could be, and she would always love him for that. For giving her the gift of Above.

But in Othniel, she had landed softly. His arms had been open even in his initial fear of her. A true miracle. Something she could never have planned for.

He turned for the first time to look and noticed that she was awake.

“Oh,” he said, quietly. “There you are.”

“Was I asleep long?” she asked.

He shook his head. “A handful of hours. I doubt the little ones would let you sleep for much longer than that.”

It was true; Sayblood would need to feed them soon. She could feel the ache of it in her chest. She sat up carefully, pulling the twins to herself. Othniel turned back to the stove, suddenly shy.

“Where did you find them?” Sayblood asked, realizing that he must have done so. The last she knew, they had vanished into the trees, an impossible sight.

“It’s odd that you ask,” he replied, readying the pot for tea. “I thought you had left them there, in the woods.”

She shook her head, unsure of how much to tell him, of how to explain all that had occurred. “I did not. Where were they?”

Othniel laughed a little, a quiet huffing sound, sort of disbelieving. “After I brought you back here, away from the flood, you were out cold and I could not revive you to ask you where they were. So I struck out to find the babies. I tell you…I was panicked. I thought they had been swept away, or taken by the devils, those starvelings.”

Sayblood heard the quaver in his voice, knew his fear to be true, even in the remembering.

“But,” he continued, “as I was heading back up to the orchard to look, the strangest thing. A doe ran across my path. She stopped, looked back at me, as though…as though she wanted me to follow. So I did. And she led me to them.”

He laughed again, that same unbelieving sound. “There they were, lying safe and warm as you like beside two yearlings in a little clearing away from the water. The doe’s own fawns, I imagine. Not a scratch on the two of them. The animals let me pick the babes up and bring them back here without a lick of trouble. I’ve never seen the like of it.”

Sayblood remembered the bird and beast escaping into the trees, her children…and decided, perhaps, that this could be the one thing she had imagined, in all of it. This, at least, had probably been a figment of her pain and distress. She did not know how her children had ended up in the clearing with the deer, but she was glad they were safe. That’s all that mattered to her. And to Othniel, too, it was clear.

“Do the waters remain?” she asked.

Othniel nodded. “The flood remains, yes, but it is receding. It may take a day or two, maybe more, but I believe it will pass. And there’s no sign of the starvelings. Not a shiver, not a print, not a sound. I believe…I do believe it’s over.”

The relief that filled Sayblood at those words was deeper, faster, more consuming than the island’s own raging torrent.

A silence crept in and settled for a moment as the woodstove popped and hissed and the kettle exhaled into the dry cabin air.

When Othniel spoke again it was so quiet that Sayblood had to ask him to repeat it.

“What will you do now?” he said again. “Now that it’s safe.”

Her daughters were warm against her. Her plan—to leave her children behind, as she believed all mothers must do to love them properly—seemed strange to her, now. With One Prince gone there was no need to run, and no one left to run from. All of her designs felt foolish. The play of a naive child. Connemara might as well be the moon, a distant thing, and uninviting.

“All that is left to me is to make home where I may,” she replied. “I have no more plans left, no more escapes to make. Just fate, as it stands.”

Othniel accepted this answer with a solemn nod. He brought a cup of tea to her and set it on the small table beside the bed, within her reach, then sat on the nearby chair with his own cup, expression thoughtful.

“Making home,” he said, “is more difficult than I first thought. Especially alone. When I left England, I thought for certain I was leaving all hopes of a family behind, and I assumed I would be content enough. I spent all my time working hard to make home here, a solitary haven, but…”

He winced at himself, sipped his tea. Then he raised his eyes to look at her. To see her. She was certain that no one had ever looked at her like that, before.

“I beg you,” he said, fierce. “Make home here, Sayblood. Fill this place with your laughter and your beauty and your questions and your strange ways. Stay for the seasons and see the flowers and fruit, the harvest and winter. Let your daughters be safe here, and grow up strong and beloved. I am not much, I know, but I’ll be good to you, and what father to them I can be out of respect for the one they lost.”

He dropped his gaze, said the last into his teacup. “Please stay with me. Please don’t make home anywhere else but here.”

The words were like the breaking of a spell, the answer to a question. It was invitation, and it was portent…but of the best kind.

Sayblood smiled, and that smile was her reply.

The twins cooed against her breast. The late winter wind nosed against the door again and again, looking for a way in. The moon spilled through the window and drenched the cabin floor in glowing puddles. And night—all velvet feet—balanced and padded along the rooftop, twisted herself in the woodsmoke, mewled her worship to the stars.

Around the cabin the little island settled.

She settled like a wild thing, pregnant with promise.

In the orchard on the hill, the old trees mumbled among themselves as the cleansing waters seeped in and down, down to their reaching roots, deeper than any other roots dare go, and the wind pulled their voices out to sea.

Unseen, their god danced upon the flood.

The eldest trees told their stories to the young saplings, prophesied a day when the hills of this little island would be covered in fruit-bearing boughs, full to the brim with prayers and spirits and voices.

Fragrant with woodsmoke and apple-sweetness.

Glinting with bright eyes, soft feet, and fluttering wings.

Alive with the songs of Sayblood’s children.

Stay tuned for the Epilogue, next week!

Thank you for reading! 🍎

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